TIGERS, DIRTBAGS, AND HOW TO ABANDON DOCUMENTARY ETHICS

I watched that goddamn Tiger King documentary and there are things I want to say about it.

I guess I’ll start with the directors. It’s incredibly frustrating to know this will open a world of opportunities for them when they should not be allowed near a camera ever again. They abandon any sense of documentary ethics and bend over backwards to try and make this into a story of a rivalry, then paint Joe Exotic as a tragic hero. From the amount of love and attention he is getting online versus the hate she is getting, it seems to have worked.

Carol Baskin is getting unfair treatment from the public because of this documentary. The ‘evidence’ of her killing her husband is so paper thin, but the movie makes as much of it as they can. All hearsay from people with an axe to grind and no actual evidence. She has little opportunity to respond to the accusations. Sure she’s obnoxious, weird, and full of herself, but she’s spent her adult life running a charity to try and protect big cats from abuse. Yet the series tries very hard to make Joe the hero because he’s more unique and more entertaining.

Taking an example of how the documentary stages reality. They look at the employment policies of three facilities, GW (Joe’s), Doc Antle’s, and Carol’s. Doc and Joe both essentially admit to forming cults. Antle preys on teenage girls, coerces them into sex, and then into ‘relationships’, paying them $100 a week. Joe preys on people fresh out of prison with no other options. On one hand it’s great to give parolees an opportunity, but he specifically goes after them because he can pay them $132 a week and work them for 12 hour days while living in horrid conditions. Carol having volunteers work for Big Cat Rescue is placed on the same level as these narratively. Carol is taking on people who are choosing to dedicate their free time to the park, which is not only less egregious than the previous two, but as a registered non-profit (something I don’t think the show mentions), that is super common. My museum was 100% volunteer run until recently. Most museums, or non-profit parks will have some form of volunteer staff.

Another piece of unethical filmmaking comes during the irresponsible discussion of her first husband’s disappearance. Not only does the film not give Carol an opportunity to explain herself, and relies on the word of acquaintances with little credibility, but it uses stock footage to imply guilt. When they discuss the meatgrinder theory, that the husband was ground up, she explains that the meatgrinder is a standard small table-top grinder that does 1-inch cubes. The filmmakers right afterwards, show stock footage of a massive industrial meatgrinder. It’s like when Michael Moore put an animated skit after interviews with Matt Stone and Trey Parker in Bowling for Columbine, your images and how you mount them communicate something.

The series seems to bend over backwards trying to make this about Carol vs. Joe, when the real story is Joe vs. Himself. Baskin only gets the upper hand on Joe when he opens himself up to lawsuits. A decade of accusing her of murdering her husband make it easy to understand when she gets the knife in and decides to twist. I can see going after Joe’s parents being incredibly distasteful, but if the goal is to shut down GW so those cats can be rescued and cared for properly, then they followed the money to do so. It was Joe who bilked his parents out of everything they had and had their names on everything. Joe got himself into financial peril, then trusted an “investor” who is the least trustworthy person I think I have ever seen. Just looking at him you should know to stay away. But Joe put himself into a desperate situation and made a desperate move that ruined his life. Not to mention he had an opportunity to make money off of a reality show, but may or may not have burned that up (with seven alligators) because he didn’t own it and it got rid of some pesky subpoenaed evidence at the same time.

Beyond Joe’s sheer ineptitude, he’s also kind of an all-round piece of shit. I’m so incredibly annoyed to see Joe Exotic popping up everywhere because he’s ‘campy fun’. He’s a piece of shit. He abused animals for decades. Whatever your position on cub-petting is, he would breed cats for that, then when they were too old just shove them into overfull or undersized pens. Pulling the animals away from their mother was cruel. That’s why when you go to buy pets from ‘reputable breeders’, they have a minimum age they have to reach before adoption. But Joe didn’t’ give a fuck. He wanted the money to buy guns and meth. And the meat truck. Jesus.

He was also a standard-issue narcissist cult leader. You could tell he was pretty in love with himself from the music videos plastered all over the series. To get his real cult leader bonafides though, he manipulated two teenagers into what amounted to sexual slavery. Something fellow and possibly even bigger piece of shit Doc Antle is guilty of too. They both use the allure of the big cats, something mentioned in the series, to draw people into their spheres. Maybe that’s what happened with the filmmakers, maybe that’s why Joe gets such a sympathetic portrayal. Maybe that’s why Doc Antle’s brigade of brides groomed as teens gets joked about instead of discussed honestly. But maybe they’re just shitty documentarians. There was no need to have Joe’s first husband shirtless, pierced nipples in sharp focus, for the entirety of the series. Why go out of your way to present one of the very few sympathetic figures in such a trashy way? The only sympathetic story is his escape from sexual slavery. The only really emotional moment (meaning an emotion besides shock, disgust, and horror) is when he covers up a tattoo above his crotch that branded him as Joe’s property. That’s an important moment, Joe is gone, and he is finally free from him. But that’s a c) plot in the final episode as we get the directors pondering Joe’s potential innocence, of that one particular thing, not his guilt for the 1000 other things.

The only good thing Joe ever did was keep a storage locker of blackmail materials. Because as a piece of shit, operating in a world of pieces of shit, I’m sure they all have their own storage lockers of blackmail material. Why would any of those garbage people ever trust one another? I hope it brings down all of them.

So lessons here?

Don’t get so fucking caught up in making an exciting story that you tabloid the shit out of your doc and make your own reality.

Joe, Doc, Jeff, Chubby McBadHaircut, Stark, all should be in prison. Just the worst goddamn people.

There should be no private ownership of exotic animals. It’s the gun control debate. You can say “in the hands of a responsible owner” all you want, but how many abused and murdered animals are acceptable so a few rich douchebags can get off on controlling a wild predator?

Trump/Hilary’s E-mails = Joe/Carol Killed Her Husband

I’m still trying to figure out how much of the blind hatred for Carol Baskin is internalized misogyny.

I feel like this doc is so of the moment, that it says so much about the country that elected Donald Trump but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe people’s affection and fascination with Joe is why Trump wasn’t drummed out of politics the second he came down that escalator. Maybe people’s fascination with and unwillingness to take seriously charismatic and immoral figures will just keep getting us in trouble. Maybe we keep thinking the system will sort them out, someone else will take care of them, but in the end it won’t. Our systems of wealth and power aren’t designed that way. Immorality is an asset. So while we laugh and say ‘that can never happen’, they slither up the ladder, for Joe it’s cultural, for Trump/Johnson/Ford it’s political, for pretty much every billionaire it’s financial. Different ladders, same snakes.